Enlightenment Through Understanding

The Left Wants Housing to Be a Bubble

January 23, 2015

Economic and demographic factors are blame for the chronic sluggishness of Europe and Japan. America has the huge baby boomer and millennial population whereas Japan has shrinking population and poor demographics. Americans consume more. American monetary policy more proactive and aggressive. America has much less regulation regarding how business can fire employees, resulting in a more dynamic business environment. It’s cheaper and easier to start a business in America. America has lower income taxes. America pioneered QE and because of its success, now everyone is copying us. This is more evidence of American exceptionalism and having the best and the brightest policy makers. Smart people save the world, again.

Housing bashers, like college bashers, are so pathetic. Yeah, I love making the landlord rich with nosebleed prices, month after month to no end. Homes in many neighborhoods are up 300% or more in the past 15-20 years, debunking the left’s belief that housing is a always poor investment.

Just like the stock market being a bubble, the left also wants to believe housing is a bubble because they want the rich, smart, successful people who own expensive homes to lose money. Real estate is all about location. Housing is weak in the crappy areas that were overbuilt in the 90′s and 2000′s, while housing is booming in the expensive, scarce areas that have economic activity such as the Bay Area, Washington DC, Long Beach, Orange County, Aspen, Seattle, Manhattan, etc. We can’t let facts and counterexamples get in the way of the liberal ‘we are doomed/everything sucks because of rich people’ narrative. According to the left’s logic, if housing is weak in some crappy, overbuilt area, it must be weak for the entire country. Just like, according to the left, the entire economy must be weak and it’s rich people’s fault if some people cannot find jobs.

Home prices in 94705 (Berkeley) for example keep going up despite the insistence by the left that the housing market is weak:

From the article:

Don’t blame the Chinese, who are showing an abundance of interest. Their share of foreign purchases leaped to 16 percent in the year ending March 2014, from 5 percent in 2007. They paid a median price of $523,148, higher than any other nationality and more than double the $199,575 median price of all houses sold.

The value of home sales to all foreigners rose 35 percent last year to $92 billion, up more than 50 percent since 2007 and accounting for 7 percent of all existing home sales. Foreigners view U.S. homes as safe investments and U.S. schools as good places to teach their children English.

This is why the left wishes China’s economy were a bubble, and is why the libs keep predicting China’s doom, to no avail. Just like failed liberal predictions of a college bubble/crisis, a Google search yields thousands of failed leftist predictions of a China crisis/crash landing, going as far back as 2004. The left wants China to be a failed state like Zimbabwe. The left resents how China’s millionaires and billionaires aren’t buying into the leftist ‘we are doomed/America is in decline’ screeds and how the Chinese, in buying up American real estate and treasuries, have faith in American exceptionalism. The wealthy Chinese, unlike the libs who comment on the NYT, don’t subscribe to the left’s ‘let’s spread the wealth’ or ‘IQ is not important’ message, and this makes the left livid.